The exponential growth of users accessing the web through mobile and a wide variety of electronic devices made responsive web designing (RWD) the default standard in website development. Studies have shown that about 260 million consumers now in the US use mobile devices to browse for e-com products and do shopping on the same platform. The retail sellers on the internet have experienced about 160% increase in the sales through mobile apps and sites.
When it comes to e-commerce cart online, most of the providers now use CMS shopping cart building applications, and Magento is one of the leading software designed specifically for e-commerce. The major objective of this online shopping cart developer is for the administrators to custom set their e-commerce carts with products and accept payments, guide checkouts, track orders, as well as manage the catalogs easily. Magento is also capable of saving the customer data over time.
Magento for e-cart
There are many applications like Bigcommerce and Shopify and so on, to choose if you sell products as well as services online, but if you want the best manageable open-source solution, which can be hosted on your server (which is very important when it comes to data security in e-commerce), Magento is the best choice to make.
If you have some baseline web development skills, then Magento will be an apt e-commerce solution. As being open source, you can use it for free and customize it based on the unique requirements of your business. There are a lot of customizable options on Magento with many extensions as well as plug-ins.
Responsive web designing
An additional mobile version of your desktop site was the standard up to now, but this dual experience lacks the critical branding elements and also puts an additional burden regarding budget and staff to manage two websites. So, the need was to deliver your web pages from single code-base which can recognize and get adapted to any of the devices it gets opened in and this is where responsive design fits in. All from a single URL, the web settings react to the screen size and get adjusted to ensure the best view.
It is not easy to launch an eCommerce website to guarantee business success. It required intensive planning and development to build a responsive website, and if not done right, it may end up in total chaos and raise many challenges as:
• Extra cost
• Slow performance
• Time-consuming
• Complex development challenges
• Difficult to manage on both user and admin sides
A recent study by Moovweb had shown that many of the internet retail e-commerce stores experienced a 500% slower performance on smartphones compared to PCs with many of the sites taking more than 18 seconds to get loaded. However, anything above 3 seconds is counted as a worse performance and end up in a larger bounce rate.
Responsiveness optimization
In Magento development of e-com carts, you can follow some smart tips to ensure responsiveness without affecting the performance of your website.
Take some time at the very beginning to appropriately analyze the traffic through mobile, create a device priority list, and then review the content architecture to move ahead with the making. Collaborating the design and development tasks and making use of appropriate prototyping tools and frameworks will help ease the process and improve the time to market. Further, we will discuss some strategies for optimizing for responsiveness.
1. Map the customer journey
Responsiveness needed to be planned from the audience point of view. So, the first step is to understand your audience and their behavior. Assess:
• What percentage of your web traffic comes through mobile phones?
• How are they accessing your site from time to time?
• Which type of devices and browsers your customers favor?
Every macro trend matter when it comes to a customer-centric approach to web designing. One thing to remember is that the latest responsive design techniques are not compatible with the older browsers like IE8 or those came before it. Identifying the devices used to access your website will let you determine the screen breakpoints.
2. Set an appropriate content strategy
Preparing the content of an excellent responsive e-commerce site is another big challenge for online merchants. For this, they have to think of really innovative ways. It is said that ensuring a responsive design need to be addressed more from a content point of view than the designing point of view.
3. Images and code
Another big challenge in RWD is that it will be very slow to load if there is a single code base for all. Here are some tips to tackle this.
• Set load priorities for first load and lazy load for faster performance.
• Use appropriate server-side technology for rendering appropriate size images based on the device screen.
• Custom code the website to reduce the number of round trips to the server and reduce latency.
• Use any open fonts than the custom fonts to reduce load weight.
One can also think of using any third-party accelerators like CDNs (Content Delivery Network) to help optimize the performance.
Some Handy Magento features to design cool e-com websites
Magento has a wide range of features and tools to be used in comprehensive e-com cart development and give a cool finish to your website design. Let’s discuss the top few features.
– Catalog Management
– Download music and videos
– Manage, edit, delete reviews
– Inventory management
– Product import and export
– Quick creation of products based on category
– Watermarking and revising etc.
– Advertising and Marketing
– Cross-sell products
– Promotional offers on selected products
– Offer coupon codes through email or offline
– Monitor coupon usage, manage newsletters and polls
Magento is also fully SEO (Search Engine Optimization) centric and also offers mobile-friendly e-commerce administration and order management to help designers make a successful website.
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